Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 2

by Malcolm J Wardlaw

  Lawrence collapsed into a pit of defeat, quite suddenly and without understanding why it had happened. He clawed mentally, trying to muster some semblance of coherence, every passing second scoring his soul deeper as the chance to deceive them slipped away forever. They were asking the wrong question. He knew with perfect clarity why he had done all these things. What he could no longer understand was how he had done them. How had he pulled the triggers? How had he ordered others to pull the triggers—and gone on giving orders for years on end? Looking back now, it was an utter mystery. He had lied to them and they knew he had lied to them. Now he spoke the direct truth as he saw it, without caring about consequences.

  “I was driven by a sense of duty built by continuous immersion in the artificial society of a glory trust. When I left that society, I left that person behind. He no longer exists.”

  The words left a peculiar hollowness, as if they had torn open a void in his soul. It was the only explanation that made any sense to him. He still yearned for a mysterious and empty world and still abhorred any prospect of the recrudescence of the Fatted Masses. It was just that these feelings no longer incited the remotest faith that blasting hapless wanderers made the world a better place. He could never have annihilated another raft of surplus no matter what threats were levelled against him.

  Loud voices and laughter rolled up the corridor. Into the cabinet office gushed a crowd of suited Party types, mostly young, yapping and smiling at a couple of older men, one of whom wore a General Wardian uniform with the Republic tri-colour armband. Their arrival shattered the moment. Sarah-Kelly stood up and called across:

  “How was the crowd at Elephant and Castle?”

  “Loud!” replied the shorter of the two men, who wore a dark grey Party suit and sucked quick drags at a cigarette.

  “That’s President Farkas,” Donald said, leaning forward.

  Lawrence was furious at the interruption, although his interest stirred as he noticed the taller man in the General Wardian uniform was familiar—he recalled meeting him at Camberley College about a year ago during a course on building spy networks in radical groups. The course lecturer was a senior Krossington official called Wingfield. As for this man’s name, it was like squelch, an odd, Spanish name. Yelcho, that was it, Martin Yelcho. He veered towards Donald’s desk and stood directly beside Lawrence, so close as to practically be offering his cock for either a suck, which he was not getting, or else an uppercut, which he might well get. Lawrence shifted his chair away a foot while Yelcho brayed:

  “You should have heard them cheering—it went on and on, a lake of fervour ten acres in area!”

  Donald edged around the desk to join Sarah-Kelly and others in what was obviously a theatre of heartiness around the president, leaving Lawrence alone with his back to them, his attention having drifted inwards replaying over and over in his mind the truth that had spilled out. Was that all it was? He had been duped by corporate propaganda into murdering thousands of people? It was a tough truth to live with. No, that was not quite right. General Wardian had been the parent he craved when he ran away from home. It had brought him up to serve its brutal purpose.

  That was the same tough truth.

  He stood abruptly, confused and angered by these acrobatics of logic. It was all the self-justifications of a fool leading nowhere. As he turned towards the door, he abruptly ducked and leaned far across Donald’s desk to get as much cover as possible from a bank of filing cabinets. Apart from Nightminster, there was no person in this world he less wanted to encounter than Andrew Kalchelik, who had just limped in smiling to join the happy gathering.

  Probably all of these Party people knew in the deepest crevices of their minds they were doomed—but this moment was theirs, this moment was their dream come true and the future could disappear. Sarah-Kelly laughed at something Farkas said. Was this how she demonstrated her contempt of Lawrence, by simply drifting off to party? Otherwise, he had to accept the incredible fact that Sarah-Kelly had become a sycophant, during which thought Donald appeared beside him. Just for a moment, there was a gleam in his brother’s eyes directed at Farkas and Yelcho, the two big-shots of the room. It was not a friendly gleam.

  Donald stooped to speak close in his ear, whilst keeping watch on his fellow Party members. In particular, his eyes followed Kalchelik, whom Lawrence was relieved to see leave the room.

  “Give me the cover letter you used to get here.”

  Lawrence put it on the desk, Donald scribbled across it in fountain pen “Issue citizen’s papers” and signed it with his title.

  “Go downstairs to the Banner Hall, it’s directly under this room, you can’t miss it. They’ll take your mug-shot and give you a temporary passport while your real one gets made up. You should be able to pick up the full passport tomorrow morning along with your Master’s Certificate. After that, get out of the Republic and stay out until these maniacs have been strung up.”

  “You think—”

  “These people have their own notions of justice—and I have mine.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Donald pulled a grim smirk.

  “If I succeed, you’ll hear about it wherever you are, and if I don’t succeed, the best of good fortune in your life.”

  Donald gripped Lawrence’s crottle pullover and would have ripped it open had he not lurched towards the door. There was nothing to look back to—he heard Sarah-Kelly’s cackle as he hastened away down the corridor.

  The directions to the hall on the ground floor were accurate. After a brief wait, his name was called and he sat before a plump-faced young woman with very black hair, which she kept sweeping back. She issued him temporary ID papers per the instructions. A photographer took a mug-shot of him. He would have to return to pick up his permanent passport tomorrow at any time after 9 am. She asked him if he intended to return to duties as an officer.

  Lawrence shook his head.

  “I’m a qualified shipmaster with an unlimited licence. However, I’ve no idea where the licence is or whether General Wardian would issue a replacement.”

  “I’ll get your file sent over from General Wardian’s head office on Northumberland Avenue,” she said. “Once you’ve been issued with your full citizen’s papers, you’ll regain all qualifications.”

  She smiled at him. She had attractive pale green eyes, her face was not fat, it was actually lean and pleasingly feline. The effect was due to wide cheek bones. “The Republic will need all the ship captains it can get; trade will go through the roof once our National Economic Policy kicks in.”

  Lawrence gave a perfunctory nod, whilst inwardly resolving that this rebellion was a carnival of mass delusion.

  Outside at the foot of the steps of the headquarters, he faced the whole sprawling market place and the chill of utter aloneness oppressed him. The world was his—he was free! It felt an empty and daunting freedom before a world of strangers.

  By a strange rebounding effect his mood soared to the heights of euphoria. He was alive, he had documentation in his pocket that gave him a place in the world—courtesy of the National Party! How long would the reprieve last before his name appeared on the Arrest List? He could not change whether that happened or not, all he could do was make the best use of whatever time he had.

  In his mind’s eye he watched Nightminster’s flying boat climb away from North Kensington basin. This evening, The Captain would posture before parade in all his finery, lord of the lost men of his Value System: Spiderman, Mirror-Face and all the rest. They deserved better than that. The image brought Lawrence’s mind to balance. He was a man with one thousand eight hundred men’s lives on his shoulders—a far greater responsibility than he ever had as a cost-centre lieutenant. Assassinating Nightminster at North Kensington basin would not save those lives, appealing though the idea was. It was going to be harder than that—far harder.

  He could not do it alone. It would require an expedition on a schooner or a big mo
tor launch by a group of daredevils. Who in this republic of righteous radicals was going to help a stranger with mad tales to tell? Perhaps the crew of some tramp schooner laid up in Limehouse basin? Or a pirate gang wintering at Gravesend? Such scoundrels might savour the whiff of gold all the more if it wafted through curtains of danger.

  An awkward, halting figure clumped down the steps not ten yards away and lurched off south towards the turnpike to Ladbroke fort.

  Andrew Kalchelik.

  As the cougar locks onto the grazing deer, so Lawrence trained his eyes on the limping form fading into the dusk. Andrew Kalchelik, the former section leader of a hygiene unit with commendations for ‘effective action’ in his personnel file, which of course, now lay in the archive of General Wardian headquarters just waiting to be examined by the Atrocity Commission, should a tip-off direct them to check a prominent member of its own ranks. How much detail would there be? Would gassing nests of infestation with smoke grenades be recorded, along with catching desperate escapees in fishing nets and ‘pacifying’ the young men with cracker pipes? Or the subsequent discharge of such-and-such a number of extracted infestations to the public drains? Even if the written record was discreet, the Atrocity Commission researchers would be well aware of the euphemisms in common use.

  Probably none of it was bad enough to get Kalchelik on the Arrest List, but it was easily bad enough to disgrace him utterly before his Party comrades. President Farkas would shout him down in public and throw him out of the Party. He would be a shunned non-entity.

  In short, he was vulnerable. He could be blackmailed. He could be squeezed to provide money, shelter and cover while Lawrence used the corporate archives to track down officers met along the way of his career who might have the gall and gold required for an expedition to the Value System. Extract half a dozen value from the system, have them debriefed by professional counsel... That was the end of Nightminster and his Value System.

  That was a plan!

  DEAR READER

  Now read Book 3: The Church of Nuclear Science. Donald, Sarah-Kelly and Lawrence all have their own plans without the least suspicion that Tom Krossington has a plan too—for all of them. After the trap springs, they have to make dangerous journeys in pursuit of their hopes. Some will succeed, and some won’t. As always, Nightminster is watching, awaiting his chance to seize power.

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